When I was in Athens in September, an archaeological ‘pilgrimage’ was made to the tomb of Heinrich Schliemann (or Σλήμαν, as he is known in Greek), excavator of Troy and Mycene among many other deeds (and misdeeds, some may say….). For some reason, I hadn’t visited before. The grave is located in the First Cemetery, […]
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News from Athens
I’m in Athens where work on the new Acropolis Museum is well underway. It will be just as big of a change to the Athenian skyline as the new Ara Pacis Museum was to Rome’s. There are more photos of the current state of the construction work below the fold. The new Acropolis Museum, Athens. […]
The Gorham Stevens Plaster Model of the Athenian Acropolis
It’s a curious and intriguing thought that at the height of World War II, the architect Gorham P. Stevens, then in residence as acting director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, busied himself with designing and making a plaster model of the Athenian Acropolis as it would have appeared in the first […]
Hack Kampmann’s Antiquity
Hack Kampmann (1856-1920) is one of the most renowned Danish pre-modernist architects. He entered the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1873, and was later responsible for designing several celebrated buildings in Aarhus, including Toldkammeret (1895), the theatre (1900) and the old State Library (1902). The Danish Art Library has made some fantastic scans […]
Robin Osborne on Phaleron and Rewriting Early Athenian History
Following up from yesterday’s post on the extraordinary finds from Phaleron, here’s an online lecture from Robin Osborne placing the mass graves (containing c.3% of the contemporary male population in Athens!) into the much larger context of archaic Greek political history and interpreting them as an expression of Athenian state power: “Archaeology and the Rewriting […]
Violence and the Archaeology of Internal War
A recurring theme in my work on ancient iconoclasm is the social meaning of violence and especially “mirror effects” in the treatment of stone and flesh-and-blood bodies, a topic that I am once again pursuing as part of the DFG network on internal war. For this reason, I was very much intrigued by the discovery […]
Safeguarding Statues in WWII
With colleagues, I am doing work on a group of sculptures now in the small archaeological museum in Agrinio. The sculptures were excavated in the 1920s, long way before the current Agrinio museum opened, and for fifty years or so they were housed in Athens. While looking into their history of display (and restoration), I […]
Omphalic Obsessions
Where is the centre of the ancient world? This is not only a question for globalisation, network or core-periphery debates in archaeology and ancient history, but is also relevant to the study of ancient conceptions of sacred geography. Specifically, the idea of Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi as the “centre of the ancient world” is a […]
Staying Behind
The grave of G.L. Harding, Gerasa, Jordan. Photo: TMK, May 2009. The archaeologist Gerald Lankester Harding is a name closely associated with Qumran as well as Jordanian and Palestinian archaeology in general. He is also one of the members of a small exclusive club of archaeologists that are buried on sites where they were active. […]
A Magic Figurine in Brussels
Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Historie, Brussels. Photo: TMK, July 2006. I have a particular fondness for Greco-Roman ‘magic’ figurines, including those that acted as ‘voodoo’ dolls. There’s a good collection of them in the Kerameikos Museum in Athens. I particularly like this example in Brussels, especially since it was donated by none other than the […]